More About Obscenity

I had a story in the Globe earlier this week about a new linguistic study of obscenity. The story ran a bit long and some of it ended up on the cutting room floor, so I thought I would reconstitute it here. Call this the "director's cut." In keeping with previous postings on NowPublic, I am including the actual unexpurgated words from these interviews, which are used in an academic context (and there is some discussion of the problem with not using the actual words), but be advised...

Some of the following material may be considered offensive.

As reported previously:

Christopher Potts, a linguist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will catalog and analyze the use of obscenities, vulgarities, and racial epithets as well as titles and honorifics. All are words or phrases that express emotion, or whose absence can convey an emotion, such as disrespect.

Potts will chart when and how these words are used in books, television, movies, records of ordinary conversation, and other discourse. He aims to discover the laws of emotionally expressive language, in the same way a physicist might chart the movement of planets in order to discover the laws of gravity."

The problem, of course, is that gravity behaves in a fairly consistent manner. Swearing and taboo words like racial epithets do not. Two sentences using such expressive language (or simply "expressives") can be identical from a linguistic standpoint but contain entirely different content.

"There are so many ways you can say 'son of a bitch,'" says Timothy Jay, author of "Why We Curse" and a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams.

"You can say it when you're angry: 'You son of a bitch!' But I can see my buddy in the pub, and say, 'Oh, you old son of a bitch!'  You have to pick up all those nuances.

Potts and a team of graduate students will examine hundreds of thousands of words and phrases, in multiple languages, in order to discern a few hundred specific and unique examples of how taboo words and other expressives are used, and how these different uses inform their meaning.

The study will try to tease out how the emotional content of such words varies, both in social context as well as in linguistic construction.

For instance, it might examine how asking "Is it wrong to call someone a nigger?" is loaded with emotional content, even though the structure of the sentence is an informational question, which would be acceptable in most other circumstances.

Similarly, Potts will look at how expressives and taboo words retain their power even if the speaker is directly quoting someone else.

"It's pretty much the case that if you say the expressive, you own it," says Potts.

Such questions are important in assessing all sorts of communication -- including the very scholarship being carried out by Potts and others in the field.

Jay notes that many of his colleagues avoid saying taboo words even when discussing them in an academic context.

"To treat it even dispassionately, you have to say 'she said cunt'. She didn't say 'the c-word'," he says. "I was lecturing in Boston a couple years ago, and there was a woman on my panel who wouldn't say the words. And I thought, 'That's not very academic.'"

By compiling his catalog of expressives, Potts will also try to establish how expressives interact with (and sometimes defy) grammar, the engine that powers most linguistics study.

For instance, there is no purely grammatical formula explaining why it's OK for a newspaper to print the phrase "the f-word" but not the word itself, even though everyone reading this article knows the word in question.

In real-world application, the word "fuck" can be a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection or gerund. Even within each of those categories, its meaning can be radically different based on context.
Yet the word is rarely misunderstood.

When I say, 'I'm angry at you,' or, 'I'm upset with you,' that doesn't emotionally match my feelings," Jay said. "When I say 'fuck you' . . . there's no other way to say 'fuck you.' There just isn't."

By the way, on a related topic I found CNN's "Nixon Uncensored" segment to be pretty amusing. It's linked below.